Five Times Lelouch Didn't Fall In Love
by Candelabra
Summary: ... and one time he did.  Multiple pairings, warning for implications of incest between half siblings.  Written for the kinkmeme.


A/N: Exactly what the title says. Five times Lelouch didn't fall in love (when he perhaps should have) and one time he did (when he perhaps shouldn't have). **Warning** for childish incest-y implications between half siblings. This was written for a request on the kinkmeme, but it's not porny at all.

* * *

><p><span>The Princess<span>

She is the perfect princess, and he the imperfect prince. She's all bright smiles and bubbly laughter, kindness and purity born out of ignorance – he's all angular lines, girl-pretty and awkward, too arrogant, too weak to be her shining knight. But it works out okay when they're children. She wants to play at being married, the two of them husband and wife and Nunnally their child. He goes along with it, he always does. His half-brothers all tease him for it, the little girly-boy that wants to play with his sisters. He is enamoured of her, they say, but the truth is they all are. He and Nunnally are the only ones Cornelia lets near her darling baby sister, and the other boys all hate him for it.

When he kills her, Lelouch thinks he once may have loved her, with the innocent misunderstanding of a child who knew only that princesses had to have princes. But he thinks, too, that he hasn't been that child for a long time.

* * *

><p><span>The Goddess<span>

He speaks to her once as a child, a demon addressing a goddess. She makes him think of his least favourite, brattiest half-sisters with her arrogant demands and her overbearing attitude. But when she cries he thinks on her a little more kindly, and it's that which stays with him over the years.

She's still bossy when next he sees her, but there's something endearing about it. Her childish face is a subtle mask, to hide the clever woman who schemes behind it.

Some days he thinks she'd be the perfect wife for him, if only he could bring himself to love her.

* * *

><p><span>The President<span>

She's an impossible girl, flighty and bossy, too perceptive for her own good, and she becomes an impossible woman. She's the best at keeping secrets, covering up everything with raucous laughter and outrageous proposals.

She drags him from his shell, makes him work and play and ignores his complaints. She thinks everyone should have fun, enjoy life while they can.

He realizes, much later, just what an impact she had on him, and how much of his speech making he learned from her example. He never realizes that she loved him.

* * *

><p><span>The Girl<span>

She reminds him a little of Euphemia, sometimes. They look nothing alike – bright orange hair instead of pink, green eyes instead of blue – but there's something in the way they smile at him, at everyone. Shirley is no sheltered royal child, but she has the same naivety about her, the same goodwill toward everyone and anyone.

He thinks that may have been what drew him to like her at first, but it took only a short while to begin liking her for herself. She is so strangely, surprisingly ordinary, different from everything and everyone else he's ever known, with petty worries and small, selfish wishes. It both comforts and frustrates him to realize people like her exist.

He doesn't notice the small glances she gives him, doesn't realize the significance of the blushes and the stammering and all her nagging, until it is far too late for him to do anything about it.

* * *

><p><span>The Soldier<span>

She makes him think of his mother. Strong, fierce, beautiful and skilled, she has none of her easy, certain grace and maturity. Too easily provoked, too easily flustered. He enjoys playing with her in his time at Ashford, but it is she he trusts to protect him the most in the heat of battle, she he trusts to defend him from the rest of the Black Knights. And it is she who abandons him, and who returns a year later to help wake him from a false life.

She's been less obvious than Shirley, in some ways, but still he realizes it sooner. He thinks, for one moment, that she'll let him kiss and touch her, explore the body he's seen once entirely unclothed, but she wants something other than just sex, something more.

And for that reason he says nothing when she walks away from him.

* * *

><p><span>The Witch<span>

She shouldn't matter to him. She blew into his life like a winter storm, destroying and rearranging everything he'd planned. She's stubborn, rude, demanding, smug and mysterious.

He hates to see her vulnerable, and he hates that he hates it. He hates that he relies on her, that she always knows just which buttons to push to rile him up.

He wants to hate her as she holds him close, as she murmurs that she won't abandon him. He wants to hate her for this cursed gift she bestowed on him.

He wants to hate her for not telling him everything she should have. He wants to hate her for being willing to go to the Emperor in order to satisfy her wish.

He hates that her wish is to die.

"You came back," he says, after his parents are gone. She looks at him with flat golden eyes, twirling a piece of hair around her finger, and his heart clenches. She already knows that he's going to tell her he can't ever grant her wish.

He considers telling her he loves her, as if that might help anything. But he knows she's heard it all before, so he only smiles, chilling and confident as he breaks their contract.


End file.
